True love may wait -- but waiting won't make you a safer lover later on

Whether sex education focuses only on abstinence or teaches students about contraception and other topics as well, it all shares one main message: Wait. In abstinence-only, students are exhorted to wait for sex until they're married. In "comprehensive" or "abstinence-plus," the idea is to delay sexual relations until... later.

"The underlying assumption is that delay reduces sexual risk-taking"and with it unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, says University of South Florida psychologist Marina A. Bornovalova. "If they just wait, then they'll be less likely to have multiple partners or get pregnant early."

"But until now, no one had tested this assumption."

Bornovalova and her colleaguesBrooke M. Huibregtse, Matt McGue, and William Iacono of University of Minnesota and Brian Hicks of the University of Michigantested it. Their finding, published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, should spark serious rethinking wherever sex educators are seeking the facts as their guide.

Yes, there's a correlation between early sexual initiation (this study defined this as 16 or younger) and later sexual risk-taking. But, as a causal factor for sexual risk-takingmultiple partners, drug and alcohol use during sexual encounters, or unprotected intercourse"it doesn't really matter whether you delay sex or not."

The researchers looked at more than 1,000 pairs of identical and fraternal twins enrolled in the longitudinal Minnesota Twin Family Study (MTFS). These twins, aged 11, upon the time of enrollment, were questioned on biological, social, and psychological factors, from parental drug use to age of puberty to friendliness. Then, at age 24, they were asked about the risks they were taking in their sex lives. In some pairs, one twin had early sex and the other didn't  and the two twins were compared on their sexual risk-taking in adulthood.

Numerous runs of the data led to the same conclusion: "You take two twins who share 100 percent of their genes. One has sex at 15 and one at 20. You compare them on risk-taking at 24and they don't differ."

So why does someone end up sexually promiscuous? The researchers think it's a combination of genetic factorssuch as the strong inherited tendency to be impulsive or anti-social  and environmental ones, such as poverty or troubled family life.

Most important, though  biology and life experience both give rise to early sexual initiation and risk-taking later on. The former does not cause the latter. The psychologists aren't advocating sex at a very early age; it very well might have other harmful effects on a teenager, such as depression or poor school performance. "But if our goal is to reduce sexual risk-taking, we need to be focusing on something else," says Bornovalova. More study is needed to zero in on what that something else is. But for now, one thing should be clear to the people writing sex ed curricula: "Whatever is causing sexual risk-taking, it is not early sexual initiation."

More information: "Testing the Role of Adolescent Sexual Initiation in Later-Life Sexual Risk Behavior: A Longitudinal Twin Design" Psychological Science.

A unique new study from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institute suggests that the attitude of families and the public have little impact on if adults decide to have sex with persons of the same or the opposite ...

Adolescents attending college six months after completing high school are significantly less likely to engage in risky sexual behavior than those who do not go to college, according to the first study to directly compare ...

Teenagers and young adults across Europe drink and take drugs as part of deliberate sexual strategies. Findings published today in BioMed Central’s open access journal, BMC Public Health, reveal that a third of 16-35 year o ...

People who are neurotic often have more difficulty with relationships and marriage. But if neurotic newlyweds have frequent sexual relations, their marital satisfaction is every bit as high as their less neurotic counterparts, ...

With a concern about inappropriate prescribing of antipsychotic medications to children, 31 states have implemented prior authorization policies for atypical antipsychotic prescribing, mostly within the past 5 years, and ...

A recent study published in the March 2015 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry finds that Family Based Interpersonal Psychotherapy (FB-IPT) is more effective in treating preado ...

Briefly counseling college students on the dangers of binge drinking is effective in lowering heavy drinking levels among many students, but only temporarily. Three out of four will be right back where they started a year ...

Although some children emerge from cold and neglectful family environments as adults with high self-esteem, a new study by a University at Buffalo research team suggests those people may still be at a relative ...

User comments

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.